Patients call a hospital to move an appointment, refill a prescription or ask about a bill. At MUSC Health, those calls frustrated patients and strained staff.
The Medical University of South Carolina’s health system now sends them first to Emily, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent built on SoundHound AI’s platform. Emily has supported more than 2.2 million patient calls since MUSC Health deployed it in 2024, SoundHound said in a July announcement. That month, MUSC Health added its retail and specialty pharmacy phone lines. Patients can ask Emily to request a prescription refill, check a refill’s status or find pharmacy hours and locations.
Before Emily, the call center was open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the system wanted 24-hour support, Crystal Broj, chief digital transformation officer at MUSC Health, told HealthTech magazine in August. She cited “patient frustration, workforce pressure” and a need to modernize. Emily is integrated with MUSC Health’s Epic electronic health record, so a changed appointment updates the patient’s record automatically, the magazine reported.
Emily Answers All 92 Patient Access Phone Lines
Emily started with two tasks and now answers all 92 of MUSC Health’s patient access phone lines, according to HealthTech Hot Spot. The first tasks were confirming and canceling appointments, Broj said in a March interview with HealthTech HotSpot at the HIMSS conference. Rescheduling came next, then Spanish-language calls.
Emily now handles 25% of MUSC Health’s patient calls, Broj told Chief Healthcare Executive in June. Staff answer the rest faster and fewer callers hang up, she said. Patients who want a live person can still reach one.
Bill Payments and Refill Requests Move to Emily
Emily also answers billing questions and helps patients pay a bill. A caller can ask to schedule an appointment and pay a bill in one call, and Emily completes the first before raising the second. “She can switch that mode and remember what you wanted to talk about,” Broj told HealthTech HotSpot.
Additionally, Emily can handle pharmaceutical refill requests, give a real-time status update and route the caller to a pharmacy team when needed. The technology has to be “secure, reliable and capable of responsibly managing sensitive patient interactions,” Broj said in the July announcement.
In Utah, AI is going a step further and signing off on some refills itself. Regulators there cleared Legion Health to let its AI renew some psychiatric medications without a physician approving each one, PYMNTS reported in April.
60% of Healthcare Firms Use AI Customer Service Chatbots
Customer service is the most commonplace healthcare firms use AI. Sixty percent use it for customer service chatbots, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Financial Services Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race” found. The May report is based on a March survey of 60 senior technology executives at U.S. enterprises with at least $1 billion in annual revenue, 20 of them in healthcare.
Spending is following. Twenty-seven percent of health systems pay for commercial AI licenses, triple the rate across the U.S. economy, PYMNTS reported in January, citing a Menlo Ventures and Morning Consult survey.
Sixty percent of healthcare firms plan to raise AI budgets over the next 12 months, the PYMNTS Intelligence report found. However, obstacles remain. Thirty percent named system integration challenges as a top AI barrier, and the same share named data quality issues. Customer journey orchestration, the coordination of every patient interaction from first contact to ongoing care, is at 5% adoption in healthcare, the lowest figure in the survey.
REMOVE ALL UNDERLINES
- MUSC Health’s AI agent, Emily, handles 25% of the South Carolina health system’s patient calls and answers all 92 of its patient access phone lines.
- Emily books and changes appointments, answers billing questions and takes bill payments, and since July has taken prescription refill requests for MUSC Health’s retail and specialty pharmacies.
- Sixty percent of healthcare firms use AI for customer service chatbots, the sector’s leading AI use case, according to PYMNTS Intelligence.
